Parenting and remote work, living like a digital nomad at home

Anna Iosif
Mar 13, 2018

Remote working and ‘digital nomadness’ is often described as a possibility to work from anywhere, work from the beach and work while travelling the world. But there is another side of remote working not talked about so often. Remote working is perfect for parents, who so often crave the possibility to live a healthy, social and present life with their kids and significant others at the same time as they juggle their careers. These parents often want to stay at the same place, where their kids’ schools and friends are.

I am one of the developers at Ushahidi. I love coding, I love diving into problems, chasing bugs and I love learning new things. Apart from being a developer, I am also a mum to two young kids. A full-time working mum. Even though I live in an equal relationship where me and my husband share everything from cooking, picking up kids, cleaning, weekly shopping, staying home when a kid is sick and on and on and on, there are still always things to do.

Four years ago, I commuted 4 hours a day to work and back again. Though I could do some of my job at the train, there was endless stress in my life and I felt my life slowly passing by outside the train-window. I also felt an urge to shift career. I worked with things related to development, but I wanted to do more - I wanted to become a developer myself. It was time for a drastic change! I quit my job, went back to school and studied coding for 2 years, all of it remotely. It was lovely! The stress more or less disappeared, I got more patient with my kids and it was about this time I also realised that this could be a way of life. I don't need to stress to work outside home every single day, I can work from home!

I now work at Ushahidi, a remote company with 30 people in 10 countries, all of us communicating and working remotely (save for some of our team who work out of an office in Nairobi). Most of us don’t meet face to face more than once a year, during our annual retreat, though we try as much as possible to create space for smaller team meetings mid year, and making a point to see team members in cities we’re travelling in for conferences and events.

“Isn’t it lonely?” people ask. “No, it’s not”, is my reply. The truth is I have more of a social life than I had while I was commuting. I now have more energy to see my friends and do things in the evenings. I also communicate with my coworkers all over the world on a daily basis, via Slack-chats, 1-1 video-calls and team-calls. Of course sometimes it would be nice to be able to pop over to discuss something, and after a stressful day me and a colleague wished we were in the same city so we could just dash out for a glass of wine and just chat away.

Working from home is not for everybody. You have to deal with the temptations from other things around you that aren’t there in an office. And you have to be able to hunt down your tasks and just start working on them. Things do not just come to you, you have to be extremely aware of what your responsibilities are and look out for them and take initiative.

Working with people from 10 different countries also mean dealing with being in different time zones. Even though working remotely lets you plan your time and give you the possibility to, for example, pick up the kids earlier, there might be a team-call waiting at 10pm in the evening and the kids ask “why can’t you just have a normal job like normal mums?? Do you really have to work now when I want to play with you??” Or just knowing there are endless conversations on Slack even though it is 8pm and I have “left” work for the day. Or waking up to 100+ conversations on slack that happened during the night. The trick is really to learn to shut off when you have left work. And to be tough with yourself about it.

Another interesting side-effect when working from home is how incredibly messy the home can be at times. As important as it is to learn to shut off work at the end of the work day, it is as important to learn how to shut off home-life while working. I have learnt to not see the dishes, the laundry and all the other stuff that needs to be taken care of in my home while I am working. Though when finishing work, turning my attention to housework and chores can be hard and my husband sometimes wonders when I turned into a really messy teenager!

It is also easy to just forget to get out the house some days. If it is raining outside, if it is really cold outside, or you just cannot be bothered... Do not do that to yourself! Staying inside your house for a whole day kind of messes with your mind so it is important to get outside even when you don’t feel like it. I try to have a weekly exercise schedule to get myself moving, I plan weekly lunch-dates with my friends or move my office for the day to a cafe or go to a coworking-space for a few hours.

You want to try to work remotely? There are endless resources and job-boards for remote work when you start looking. My favourite ones are:

- Working nomads

- We work remotely

- Remote OK

Just go for it! <3